In April 2006 I learned that my husband and I were expecting our fourth child. My first thought: thank G-d for another blessing. My second: this 2 bedroom rental on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was not going to cut it anymore. It was time to move to the suburbs. My third: how am I going to make this all work – with work?

Back in 1950, with the ashes from the massacre of Eastern European Jewry still smoldering and a fledgling State of Israel taking its first tentative steps, an American Jewish rabbi wrote a very prescient article.

“What kind of American Jewish community do we desire, and how shall we plan to achieve it?” asked Robert Gordis in a Commentary Magazine essay titled, Creating an Organic Community: A Blueprint to Assure American Jewry’s Future.

Over the past several years, we have been witness to the unraveling of the global economy and more directly the American enterprise. This economic “tsunami” has led to a fundamental reordering of the structural and financial well-being of many core institutions. In particular, this upheaval is having a profound impact on the American Jewish community.

We are not a religion and we’ve never been a religion. Judaism is the culture of the Jewish people. It bases itself entirely on the covenant between a People and God Almighty – not between an individual and God.

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Honorable mention also goes to the following article, published in June 2010, and solidly in 2012’s Top Ten:

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